Forget About 1vs1 Class Balance

What does a dps merc bring to the table that a sniper dosen't?

If the answer is nothing, why bother bringing a dps merc to a 8v8 rated?

If your answer is cleanse and heals, punch yourself in the face.

I've never felt that MMO pvp should be based on 1 on 1, regardless of which class I was playing in which MMO and what they happened to be good at.

What really matters is that classes have something they're good at, something that makes them viable in regularly occurring situations making that class desirable to have around.

Take tankasins for an example. One of the best 1 on 1 classes, to be sure. Would that mean loading up your team with 8 tankasins is the way to go?

It would be good in huttball. Even then, the fact that it would be good in huttball has little to do with them being good at 1 on 1, but rather that they're simply good at moving the ball and having lots of people with force pull would be detrimental to the enemy ball running offense.

But what about the other 3 warzones? Maybe not so much. I suppose you could make it work. They have good utility and survivability and it'd be difficult to gauge exactly who was going where if groups traveled in stealth. Would it be optimum though? Surely not. Tankasins aren't good healer killers, so an enemy team with a few good healers would give them serious problems. If you really coordinated burst, you could take people down, but you could certainly do it a lot better with a more balanced group makeup.

So what that team would need is some more burst damage. What if they dropped a few Tankasins from their 8 tankasin roster and picked up 3 DPS PTs? Now they'd be much better suited to beating those teams with several healers, since the PTs could coordinate and easily take healers down. Tankasins beat DPS PTs in a 1 on 1, yet here's a situation where it is better to have some PTs than more Tankasins.

But now they run into a new problem. People see those PTs and they know to take them down first. Those PTs die faster than tankasins but the team doesn't have any healing to keep the PTs alive so they can do their thing. The tankasins try using guard on all their PTs but it doesn't quite work out as well as they like. The enemy wises up and starts splitting up guarded targets from their tank via different CC options and our friendly team just can't seem to keep their DPS up in a meaningful way. In the periods where the guard is separated from his target, the DPS ends up dying against good teams before they seem to really be able to take as many people down as they'd like.

So now the team needs to pick up some heals. If they had a healer or two to keep those Powertechs alive, the Tankasins could run around doing their thing, throwing around taunts and guard while assisting the dps and the PTs wouldn't die easily either. So now it might be time to shift that roster from 5 tankasins and 3 PTs to 3 Tankasins, 3 PTs and 2 healers. Now PTs are fairly good at killing healers 1 on 1, shouldn't we just load up with more PTs? Not this time.

So the tank/heal/dps trinity is intact. Different classes are good for different things (who knew?) and we can see that at least the core roles provide synergy with each other, as we all knew they did already.

So we're good on that. Where's the balance come in? The balance comes in distinguishing the classes within their roles. The game actually has this in place already (not as good as I'd like in all areas, but it exists). I mentioned all the tanks being tankasins above. But would that really be the optimum way to go? A 3 tankasin 3 DPS PT, 2 healer (lets say 2 operative healers since those are en vogue atm) would be a good team, surely. Would it be the best though? I don't think it would. What if we took one of those 3 tankasins out and put in a Juggernaut tank? Jugg tanks lose to tankasins 1 on 1 (long fight, but they lose), is this still a good idea?

Sure it is. Juggernaut tanks have higher passive mitigation than tankasins and several useful CC options. They are great for wasting time at nodes and just overall taking a long time to kill while reinforcements/respawns arrive.
So they have a use here on this team and we can take one of the tankasins away and put this juggernaut tank in. Good deal.

So now we have 2 tankasins, 1 jugg tank, 3 DPS PTs, and two operative healers. Looking pretty good here, but wait! There's no trauma debuff on this team. We don't want to sacrifice much of what we have but it sure would be nice to have that around. Sometimes in those games against 3 healers the team was having trouble really bursting people down. That would really help.

Maybe we could sub a marauder for one of those DPS PTs! They aren't quite as bursty but they still do very good damage, and we can pick up the trauma debuff to help break some of those stalemates against good teams that are healer heavy.

See where I'm going with this?

You might say "Well that's not fair, you put PTs, Tankasins, Marauders, and Healing Ops on your team. Those are the classes we say are the best anyway. The only thing you changed up was putting in that one jugg tank!"

True. We know some classes fill the roles better than others. So that's where the balance should take place. Note that none of these selections had much to do with 1 on 1, but simply adding more tools to the team while sacrificing as little as possible. If we want to make a case for adding lets say, a Pyro Merc to the team, we don't need that Merc to be good in 1 on 1 for him to be worth taking. What we need is for him to bring something useful to the team in general. Something that comes up regularly, where he was worth having over someone else. It doesn't have to be him doing directly more damage or even being good at 1 on 1. Here's where Bioware can make improvements.

That's balance.

@ ShadowOfVey

You post eloquently here and have managed to frame what I was trying to convey, with real SWTOR examples.

I guess the upcoming ranked pre-season, and associated results / feedack, could be key to this type of balance, i.e. where each and every class has something unique and equally valuable to bring to the WZ, and not necessarily to all have an equal chance 1 vs 1.

I am fairly certain Messi would still win games on his own... other teams are just that bad... kinda like the players in this game.

Anyone?

Not in TOR. Maybe if we had world PvP, sieges. Unfortunately all we have is 4 WZs where healers are goods. You can not comlete your objectives without killing your enemies, thats why WZs became dull and predictable, all you need is more and more healers.

This.

The fact is that there are some practically useless classes that aren't doing anything good either 1v1 or in a team, and some classes do much better than others 1v1 and in a team. It's more like there are rock, paper, scissor, dynamite, and cheese. That's not balance. Stop playing your FOTM classes for once and try these other classes out.

While I agree with your premise somewhat, I have to disagree with what you are concluding. There are certain imbalances that should be fixed. I have a healing operative and a healing merc. Without a doubt the healing operative is way better in every way (for me at least). My op can pretty much beat anyone 1v1 and my merc can't beat anyone 1v1. (assuming close gear and skill)
Ok, so you are saying this isn't a 1v1 game. That's fine because my op heals a ton more per warzone, stays alive longer and wins more.
I'm comparing apples and apples and one is just plain better than the other. Just like Royal Gala apples are better than Red Delicious.
Perhaps it's me. Maybe I'm just better at the op than the merc. The differences are drastic to me though.

You aren't wrong at all. These are exactly the types of issues that should be addressed regarding balance. Distinguishing within similar roles for useful functionality across the board between them. If one is better at straight healing output, another should perhaps be a bit harder to kill, while another should have some useful tools that assist the team in other meaningful ways.

Regarding healers, what shouldn't be desired is that every healer is exactly as useful as another in all situations (which is in fact, impossible). What should be desired is that if one is best in some situations, another is good in others, yet another is good at others still. That can be in regards to enemy team composition, friendly team composition, terrain, LOS availability, scale of battle (is it 3 on 3 or 8 v 8), or any other area that is meaningful.

We can make similar comparisons between DPS. Merc DPS characters are lacking at the moment. They aren't lacking because they lose 1 on 1s, they are lacking because they don't have an appropriate functionality to offset their weaknesses making them worth taking for other reasons. That could be offset by either increasing their damage, increasing their kiting ability, giving them some sort of tool for additional mobility, giving them some new tool that currently doesn't exist in the game, or any other combination thereof resulting in them excelling in certain situations.

FINALLY someone with brains and guts enough to post the most wise thread in the PvP subforum. This is the reason, why all the crying and number-comparing is useless information.

This game currently is strongly based on Teambalance.

A healer, who plays a support class or mercenary/commando, who obviously play damage support just aren't supposed to beat a 1v1 class in 1v1. So is the marauder/powertech/whatever unbeatable just because of his class?

No he isnt.

You can still beat him when you have a higher skill then him. If not, well unlucky you, either your team didn't support you good enough or that defeat was meant to happen on paper. If aformentioned classes aren't able to beat a support role, what role do they play during a match then?

Also Warzones aren't flat maps. It has objects to loose line of sight and to kite. You can hide and have an advantage on an upper position. You can grab the damage/defense buff and if you're smart you can grab the heal buff as well.

Also you aren't contributing to Warzone sucess just with damage, tanking or healing numbers. You need to time the exact moment to ninja that turret. You need to decide, which of the dps is worth keeping alive. You need to know who to tank and when to switch your guard. You need to know who you should kill first. You need to know, who would be at a disadvantage, when slowed down. You need to know who to CC. There's just this unimaginable number of variables and priorities you need to decide on.

That's why determining the worth of a singular advanced class, nay even a singular spec is pretty damn difficult. And that's why saying "but if skill and gear level are equal we will, based on numerical calculations, loose to that class ( Q_Q" is the most ignorant thing to say.

And damn it, if you suck so much with your class, then fine, roll with another one, you think is so super easy to play and just shut up and have fun.

Just please leave the professionals at BioWare do their work, they'll be knowing what they are doing, unlike all of the gamers, who can only scream their subjective opinion on the forums. Do you seriously think BioWare planned on nerfing classes so hard, that they are unplayable just to take the piss out of you? Please...

In my opinion, this game has one of the most awesome balance there is, that's why it has kept my fun for so long.

But you know, whatever, this thread will be shouted down by stupid players anyways eventually.

Most of the self-acclaimed PvP experts here just suggest ridicolous stuff. I mean, how can you seriously want "perfect" balance? For that, every AC needs to be a clone of itself. Wow, imagine how exciting PvP will be then and how many people staying to play it.